Contemporary anthropology is, with notable exceptions, increasingly self-aware. Ethnography has seen a number of variations in style and ethical compass over the last century. As a practice, it’s come a long way from a hobby meant to satisfy the imperialist curiosity for the exotic. Long gone are the days of a colonial white male making grand generalizations about a faraway subsistence culture. Ethnography in the 21st century makes a concentrated effort to instead contribute to a decolonization of Western academic thought and, in some cases, decolonization on the ground. (Not to say there isn’t an old guard in much of academia; anthropologists of color have numerous stories describing how their research and contributions to theory have been blocked by a narrowminded white majority.)

In general, though, ethnography as long-term or ongoing participant observation has been the foundation of the practice. Then enters design anthropology. It disrupts this practice by putting forth a new paradigm of ethnographic fieldwork, one that is short lived and decidedly interventionist. 

As described by Ton Otto and Rachel Charlotte Smith, ethnographic practice has room to to incorporate design thinking. A marriage of these disciplines can encourage a futures-oriented mindset that gives greater weight to emergence in a community or culture than the ethnographer may otherwise typically observe. A design ethnography makes an effort to use the past as context for the present, but then aims to co-produce possibilities for varying futures. This human capacity for cultural change is embraced, appreciated, analyzed, and directly engaged with by the fieldworker.

In other words, a design anthropologist doesn’t use ethnography to freeze a culture or community in space and time. They are not seen as a static group. Instead, their “now” is contextualized. Their future-building is where the ethnographer participates. 

“Since the present includes both its past and its future potential, anthropologists have to develop ways to include the anticipation and creation of new forms in their ethnographic descriptions and theorizing,” write Otto and Smith. “A new criterion of success would be how design anthropologists are able to correspond and collaborate with people as co-creators of desirable futures and to be the facilitators of knowledge and meaningful practices that transform the present.”

I think about the famous and beloved satoyama that come from Japan’s Edo period. Satoyama are predominantly self-sustainable villages built into the landscape, where resource and land stewardship is a communal responsibility. These villages have become almost mythical to modern designers of green and sustainable cities; they stand out as evidence of what communities can co-create and co-manage alongside nature. Today, as Japan’s rural communities begin to disappear, a nostalgia for the satoyama is taking on industrialized city centers, everyday people, and the media. What will communities across Japan co-create? How could the design anthropologist enter this equation as a facilitator of change and futures-making?

Otto and Smith acknowledge that this is a significant shift for anthropology. Typically, ethnographic fieldworkers make great efforts to be blend as a participant, or disappear as an observer. A treasure trove of analysis exists that directly tackles the issue of change in a community’s or informant’s behavior caused of the very presence of the fieldworker. The assumption in many of these discussions is that a change in behavior caused by the anthropologist’s presence has a negative effect on the data gathered. How can one be sure that certain behaviors weren’t performative, adapted, or hidden from the fieldworker? This issue is heightened when the ethnographer, usually white or European, others the community.

“We consider this a necessary step in the face of contemporary local-global transformations and the corresponding academic requirement of developing responsive conceptual frameworks and interventionist practices. A growing body of literature addresses the entanglement of culture and design from a more transformative and imaginative stance… What emerges from these interdisciplinary approaches to technology and change is that culture and design are not separate analytical domains or extensions of each other. Rather they are deeply entangled, complex, and often messy formations and transformations of meanings, spaces, and interactions between people, objects, and histories. It appears now an accepted premise that culture is always already an ingrained and situated part of design practices, but the reverse is equally valid and relevant: by designing objects, technologies, and systems, we are in fact designing cultures of the future.”

Design anthropology embraces these opportunities. Thoughtful interventionist strategies can benefit the community, and anthropologists are uniquely positioned to engage in these transformations. 

Sources:

• Quotes are from the chapter “Design Anthropology: A Distinct Style of Knowing” by Ton Otto and Rachel Charlotte Smith in Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice
• Image sourced from @bamagal on Unsplash